Putting Forecasts to Work
Getting from orientation to action
In the week since the 10F Forecasts went public, we’ve been encouraged by both the scale and the range of engagement. Downloads and site traffic have exceeded our early expectations, but more telling is the spread of who’s showing up. Thank you to everyone who downloaded the collected forecasts, AREAS framework tool, or individual forecasts — and to those who shared them with someone else.
In the futures field more broadly, the Institute for the Future and the Long Now Foundation both engaged with the 10F Forecasts this past week—thank you to IFTF for including us in their newsletter. We share the commitment to taking futures work seriously — and to making it useful when it matters most.
Alongside the futures community, we’re seeing strong uptake from governments, foundations, NGOs, research institutions, and companies navigating the kinds of systemic shifts the forecasts describe. We’re also seeing significant engagement from individuals — researchers, practitioners, and engaged citizens making sense of a rapidly changing world on their own terms. That breadth matters. This work was designed for organizations making real decisions under uncertainty, but the questions it raises aren’t only organizational ones. Seeing it reach both is exactly what we hoped for.
The forecasts are available in full at 10fconsortium.org, with individual forecasts downloadable separately for those who want to start with what’s most relevant to your context. If you’ve found your way here through a colleague or a shared link, welcome — and consider subscribing to From→To for ongoing analysis, advice on application, and practitioner insights as the project develops.
What We’re Hearing
Since launch, we’ve convened two closed practitioner sessions — in Adelaide with a group assembled by Ariella Helfgott, and in New York with Lina Srivastava, Aarathi Krishnan, Susan Cox-Smith, Scott Smith, and Jake Dunagan (whose participation was made possible by IFTF). These convenings drew from across philanthropy, policy, civil society, narrative and international development. Different geographies, different sectors, similar responses.
Three things stood out.
The analysis isn’t landing as news. Practitioners working across international systems recognize the dynamics the forecasts describe — they’ve been navigating them without language for it. The response is less “I hadn’t considered this” and more “finally, a way to name what we’re already seeing.” The forecasts aren’t asking people to imagine an unfamiliar future. They’re helping people see a present they’re already in.
The dominant question is what to do next. Not skepticism about the analysis — acceptance of it, followed immediately by the harder question. In both rooms, the most consistent demand was for guidance on application: how do organizations actually use this? That’s partly what drove the tools piece below, and what will drive much of what we publish here going forward.
There’s a misreading risk worth naming. Concern emerged in both sessions about readers treating the forecasts as instructive rather than descriptive. If this is how the world works now, this is how you have to operate. That’s not what the work is for. The forecasts map structures of harm and transformation so you can see them clearly and respond with agency. Naming a dynamic isn’t an endorsement of it. The old norms didn’t disappear — they’re contested, which means contestation is still possible.
Support a Convening
Both sessions were made possible by organizations willing to underwrite the conversation: SA Futures Agency supported Adelaide; RAKSHA Intelligence Futures, the Center for Transformational Change, and Changeist supported New York. That model — a host organization or funder covering the costs of bringing the right people into the room — is one we’re looking to extend. We’re currently exploring similar sessions in Berlin and London, and open to others. If your organization wants to bring a 10F conversation to your city or community, get in touch at info@10fconsortium.org.
Two Ways to Put the Forecasts to Work
Most organizations that engage with foresight work read it once, discuss it, and move on. The report gets filed. The insights fade. This is a waste of what the work can actually do — and it’s what we want to address in this and coming issues of From→To.
The 10F Forecasts are built around a From→To structure. Each one maps a shift already underway, anchored in a set of assumptions that used to be reliable enough to build strategy on. That structure isn’t just analytical scaffolding. It’s a working tool.
Here are two ways to use it, both achievable in a single meeting.
Check Your Assumptions
The Old Assumptions section of each forecast is a list of beliefs that organizations are still — often quietly, often unconsciously — operating on. Not because they’re naive, but because institutional inertia is real and strategy cycles are slow. The world moves; the assumptions don’t.
Pick the two or three forecasts most relevant to your domain and pull those assumptions out. Convert them into standing questions you return to quarterly. Are we still seeing evidence that this assumption holds in our context? Or are the signals pointing the other way?
The From→To frame describes a direction of travel, not a fixed destination. Different organizations will hit different points along that trajectory at different times, depending on sector, geography, and the specific actors they work with. A humanitarian organization operating in Southeast Asia might still be mid-transition on a shift that a European foundation has already passed through. The check helps you locate where you actually are — which is more useful than simply knowing the trajectory exists.
The output doesn’t need to be elaborate. Three columns: assumptions still holding, assumptions degrading, assumptions that have already flipped. Done as a team conversation, with your specific operating environment as the filter. Your team supplies the judgment. The forecasts supply the categories.
Stress-test a Decision
Each forecast includes three scenario pathways describing how a given shift might unfold — not as predictions, but as structured alternatives that capture meaningfully different futures.
Most readers treat these as illustrative. They’re actually a stress-testing kit.
Take a decision your organization is facing in the next six to twelve months. Run it against all three pathways for whichever forecast is most relevant. The question isn’t which pathway you’ll land in. The question is whether your decision holds up across all three, or whether it only survives under one set of conditions. If it only works in one pathway, you’ve learned something important about how much optionality you’ve actually built in — and how exposed you are if conditions move differently than you’re assuming.
This isn’t a multi-day scenario planning exercise. The scenarios do the heavy lifting. You supply the decision.
Forecasts in the Wild
This week The Economist published a piece on the financialisation of AI infrastructure — the emergence of GPUs as collateral, securities, and hedging instruments. A new asset class, effectively, built not on sovereign currency or commodities but on compute.
This is F09 — From Dollar Dominance to Money Unbundled — playing out in real time. One of the core arguments in that Forecast is that the boundaries defining what counts as money, value, and exchange medium are dissolving. We’re moving from a world where a small number of established currencies and instruments dominate global finance toward one where multiple, sometimes incompatible, forms of value circulate in parallel. Compute, energy, data, and access are all acquiring monetary properties — not as metaphor, but as mechanism.
The GPU story is an early and legible instance. It won’t be the last. Organizations that still assume a relatively stable, dollar-anchored financial environment as the backdrop for their planning are carrying an assumption worth examining.
The full Forecast is available here.
What’s Ahead
The conversations that began in Adelaide and New York are continuing. Livestream sessions are in development for March, scheduled across time zones to reach the full geographic spread of the consortium and its audience. Watch for more details soon.
From→To will keep returning to the question of application — how organizations are using the forecasts, what’s working, what questions the work is raising that it doesn’t yet answer. If you’re putting the forecasts to work and want to share what you’re finding, we’d like to hear from you at info@10fconsortium.org. And if someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe here.
Next issue: the AREAS framework as a positioning tool — mapping where your organization stands in relation to the shifts underway, and what that means for strategy.
A Question for Our Readers
The Forecasts cover ten shifts, but organizations don’t experience them equally. Which one is creating the most friction — or the most unexpected opportunity — in your context right now?
Leave a comment below — we’ll respond, and the best threads will shape what we cover in future issues.
Follow the Project
Beyond this newsletter, you can find 10F on:
LinkedIn — 10F Consortium — longer-form updates and discussion
Bluesky — @10fconsortium.bsky.social — signal tracking and real-time commentary
Instagram — @10fconsortium — visual summaries and forecast highlights
GitHub — 10F Consortium — full forecast archive with version history and transparency
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